A Thriller with an Asian American Twist

October 1, 2006

Filipino American directors Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana on their film CAVITE

By Chuleenan Svetvilas

Neill Dela Llana (left) and Ian Gamazon at the Center for Asian American Media’s sneak preview screening, June 6, 2006The fourth time’s the charm for Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana. After making three feature films, CAVITE is their first production to get distribution. The riveting microbudget thriller was written and directed by the Filipino American duo who also gave themselves additional jobs – Dela Llana as cameraman and editor and Gamazon as starring actor and sound recorder.

CAVITE follows Adam (Gamazon) as he journeys from San Diego to the Philippines for his father’s funeral. Once he arrives, his mother fails to pick him up at the airport and doesn’t answer his phone calls. Adam’s nightmarish ordeal is about to begin. A cell phone that has somehow been inserted in his luggage rings and a male voice tells him that his mother and sister have been kidnapped. Adam must follow his instructions or they will be killed. He is directed through squatter camps where people live in abject poverty, down strange alleyways, to a cockfight arena, and other places that are bewildering and disorienting to Adam. As he later discovers, the man is a member of the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf. To save his family, Adam is eventually forced to make an impossible decision.

“CAVITE takes the suspense/thriller genre and imbues it with a gripping socio-political context,” says Chi-hui Yang, festival director of the Center for Asian American Media. “The film is so completely new and fresh that it forces a re-understanding and realignment of the cinema.” Yang calls the film globally focused, but from a distinctively Asian American perspective.

Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana were recently in San Francisco promoting their film. Chuleenan Svetvilas interviewed the 32-year-old directors about making the film, getting distribution, and dealing with success. CAVITE opens in the Bay Area on June 16, screening at Landmark Theatres.

IG: I directed the first one—an anti-romantic comedy called DIEGO STORIES, which we’re not very proud of. I also played the lead in it.

NDL: That was done in 1996 when we were students at San Diego State. I played a supporting role, helping creatively. The second feature, THE BOOK, was one that I directed. It was a campy X-FILES sci-fi film–another overly ambitious, under-experienced project. Ian played the lead role in that movie.

IG: Out of desperation, but I’m retired now. The third film, which I directed, was called FREUD’S SECOND LAW. That one had some film festival success in 2001 but no distribution, nothing, and it died.

NDL: Around the summer of 2001, Ian was living in LA and I was in San Diego and we were saving money by talking on our cell phones during the free nights and weekends. We had a conversation where we just had one of those “what if” questions: “What if somebody kidnapped you and the kidnapper forced me to save you?” And it was just like, “Bing!” that’s a movie. But the most important thing was that it was a movie that could be done cheaply.

IG: We were going to have the film take place in LA or San Diego but then we realized, you know what? Let’s go to the Philippines. So we researched what was going on the Philippines–the Muslim-Christian conflict there.

NDL: We had already decided to set it in the Philippines and once 9/11 happened, we thought “Wow, there’s a lot going on in the world right now. What’s currently going on in the Philippines?” That’s when we learned more about the Abu Sayyaf conflict with the Philippine government. For the next couple years during the writing process, we just learned as much as we could and incorporated it into the script.

NG: I think with THE BOOK, we tried to infuse some political context but it was very fictionalized politics–like the U.S. government is controlling our minds, very X-FILES. But CAVITE is our most topical, contemporary film.

NDL: The last time I was in the Philippines was back in 1999. A lot of the locations I had already seen before, like the cockfight and the market and so when we wrote the script in 2002, we could incorporate those locations in there. But at the same time, we wanted to location scout just to make sure that it was practical to shoot at a cockfight. Some other locations we hadn’t seen before like the squatter camps. That was totally brand new to us.

IG: We hated it. We tried to find someone for over a year but nobody wanted to go to the Philippines.

NDL: We auditioned actresses for a year but once we told them what they were going to have to go through – go to the Philippines with two strangers to film this terrorist thriller for no pay, then everyone was like, “No.” Maybe a few said yes, but they weren’t right for the part.

IG: A month before the actual shoot, we just had to stop auditioning. We already had our plane tickets. Then Neill had the idea that I should do it. And that’s what we did. It’s not something that I’d want to do again.

NDL: Yeah, it was our two-week vacation. The first two days, we did some location scouting and some casting of the small roles. The next ten days straight we shot the movie. It was perfect weather for ten days. On the eleventh day it rained.

NDL: By location. Every morning we’d get up at 4 or 5 in the morning and think about what was practical that day. Can my aunt drive us to that location today? Can we shoot this scene today or do we have to go to the church today? We’d start shooting at 7 in the morning and end at 6 at night. Some days we’d only shoot one scene, like the church scene, we had to travel half a day to get there.

NDL: Actually, a lot of it was storyboarded. So on the script, we’d have little pictures that I used as a guide to shoot the scene. It’s all preproduction planning. Our thing was like, we have a 10-day window, let’s not screw it up. Let’s get what we want and let’s know exactly what we want.

IG: We had notes. We made sure we were on the same page–camera wise, acting wise—so when we got to the Philippines, everything was pretty much done.

NDL: We didn’t know them. We just read John’s books [Spike Mike Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Through a Decade of American Cinema; Spike Mike Reloaded]. We knew about him from all the movies he had sold or was involved in. He didn’t know who we were.

IG: We went on the Internet and looked for his address.

NDL: And we sent him a copy. That was it. The only thing we were hoping for was his response. Tell us what you think about the movie. Does it suck? Is it good? Is it something? All we knew was that he hadn’t been [representing films] for years. Janet called first and said, “I really like your film. I’ll try to get John to watch it one day.” But John did not watch it for six months. So a month before our film screened in the South by Southwest Film Festival, I called Janet to ask her for some advice — any tips about getting press, distributors. They were living in Austin [where the festival takes place] back then. Janet got John to watch it and pretty much the next day, he emailed us and said he wanted to help us. He was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin at the time, teaching a producing class. He said he wanted to turn our movie into a class project. Basically his class helped us get press and meet with distributors.

IG: Mostly from the older generation–a percentage of them. We’re storytellers. We showed that because it felt right for the story. It wouldn’t have been right to show palm trees and white sand beaches.

NDL: We also get criticism from people who haven’t even seen it yet. They’re questioning some inaccuracies, asking questions like, “Why is this taking place in this town which has nothing to do with Abu Sayyaf?” And just from seeing the trailer, they say, “Why are you showing the poverty? Why are you misrepresenting the Philippines? I’m deeply offended.”

IG: It’s the nature of what we were doing.

NDL: We knew it would push people’s buttons but I guess we take the good and the bad.

NDL: Telling a good story comes first. If it’s going to include Asian Americans, then yeah, if it’s not then we may not go that way but definitely it’s something that we talk about. At some point we want to go back to the Philippines and shoot another film there. But we don’t want to restrict ourselves and say that’s our next movie.

Visit the official CAVITE website for more information about the film.